Tournaments & karma: new rules

[sourisdudesert]

Dear tournament players,

Following your feedback on "absent players" in tournaments, and particularly turn-based tournament, we introduced the new rules below:

• For all tournaments, it is now mandatory to set a minimum reputation requirement. By default the requirement is set to 65 karma.
• The reputation check is done when you register for a tournament, and the check is repeated 24 hours before the tournament begins. The players who no longer meet this requirement are unregistered from the tournament. The 24 hour delay allows other players to join the tournament in their place.
• For players with a terrible reputation (under 20), we are now withdrawing them from tournaments in progress. "Withdrawing" means that they are still able to finish their current game, but will not participate in any future games in this tournament.
• To protect tournament participants against new BGA accounts that may register for hundreds of tournaments, there is now a limit to the number of turn-based tournaments you can join based on your turn-based experience (number of turn based games played).
• To protect tournament participants against BGA accounts that are suddenly inactive, there is now a (pretty high) absolute limit to the number of tournaments you can join: 100, and 400 for Premium (explanation: Premium are less likely to suddenly abandon their accounts).

All these rules apply to public tournaments only. Using private tournaments and personal tournament invitation, you can skip all of these controls and create tournaments with whoever you want.

We set these new rules after reading your feedback and after doing a complete analysis of the "absent players" situation, to make sure that it addresses the problem and does not create others. In particular, we do not want- as many of you suggest- to give the power to tournament creators to expel players from tournaments: public tournaments are an important part of the competition on BGA and we do not want someone to be excluded from a tournament for personal reasons. For the same reasons, you cannot forbid a player you "red thumbed" to join a tournament you create. Again, if you want to select the players of your tournament, choose the "private tournament" option or "personal invitation."

[dgjxqz]

Thanks for making it harder to ruin tournaments.

I was thinking that it would be much simpler to just trigger one of the two events (unregister or withdraw a player) base on the current state of the tournament (planned or in progress) but there may be a problem as differrent tournaments have different reputation requirements set by organizing players. Meaning that you have to query the database for a list of participating tournaments whenever there is drop in the karma of a player which could be a costly transaction. I am unsure how long does it take to regain karma from 0 to 100 (I assume you have check the statastics?), if it is less than half a day than the check 24 hours ahead could be still be evaded. And if a player can restore his karma everyday than the check is obsolete.

While it is good to not unregister players only minutes before a tournaments starts but it should be an exception rather than a norm. So IMHO it is OK to unregister them anytime their karmas drop instead of a fixed 24 hours ahead. As far as I know, you can't prevent a player with maliciuos intent from registering a tournament and unregister last minutes to cause less than maximum participation anyway (how to prevent this and if someone will exploit it in the future is beyond the scope of this thread). There are many other potential exploits which I doubt if they should be discussed here.

Edit: OK, just one as it is somewhat related. I haven't tried this but I believe that's the case at the moment, you can use an account with 100 karma to register for a tournament and then invite another account with 0 karma into the tournament after the 24 hour check is performed.

Also, the reputation check should be at least slighly below reputation requirement. E.g. if you need 50 to register, you're only unregistered if you're below 40. If check is equal or higher than requirement, offending players can just rejoin immediately.

While the implemented fix does curb abuse to a certain extend, it hasn't solve the fundamental issue of karma not being a good indicator of a player's reputation, which is still causing other minor annoyances such as being matched with a slow opponent or he walks out often in non-tournament games. A radical way to solve this is to completly do away from relying on an indicator and instead minimize the inconveniences caused by slow players. Instead of abandoning a game after a cummulative per game time, each turn has a certain shorter thinking time. When a player is out of thinking time, act of his behalf to perform a random legal (comply to game rules) move. This way, the game remains playable. I understnand that this may require changing all existing games and may have some other potential loopholes, but it has other side benefits such as allowing automated testing and generic AI players.

[Caffe Latte]

Thank you. Please add somewhere actual number for tournies i have registered. I went to filter - only t i have registered - and no count there. I Can only count manually clicking load more repeatedly.
So I would have idea whether I have 1 left or 99 )

[RicardoRix]

This is brilliant news.

Unfortunately tournaments can still be ruined by players with 100% Karma.

I would suggest that Tournaments and Arena have a zero tolerance policy. This would be standard and normal for any real-life tournament. There is just no breaching of rules. And the up-side is that players feel that justice will always prevail and players cannot abuse the rules or system in any way. So in the long-run will benefit all players.

As an example I'm currently playing in a tournament that has a very high level of timed-out games: Many people have outed-out of the tournament simply out of frustration that a game is unlikely to end. Most of the timing-out players hold a 100% (or near to 100%) karma.
https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=111410
Notice it's the same players timing out again and again, but don't voluntarily leave the tournament. From a rough estimate it seems like 25% - 50% of the games have timed-out.

It would be nice if players would be auto-kicked from the tournament if they time-out.

If a table times out, then the points result can be different. This also means that you can't quite tell, it's not just 1,1,1,4 from the tournament page, timed out games might as well be 1,2,3,4 and look like a normal result. Example of 2 games from the tournament:
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=272098546
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=268137591

Arena would also benefit from for some kind of server penalty if a player times-out too.

[Tanjanica]

Thank you for enacting the changes. I hope the problems will be fixed now.

[ChrisKern]

Thank you; this probably won't solve all the problems but it at least deals with people who are being reckless at best.

>It would be nice if players would be auto-kicked from the tournament if they time-out.

I think this is too harsh; having players ejected from tournaments can cause problems with the tournament, and having that automatically happen because someone went a couple of hours over their time doesn't seem like a good idea to me. I've gone over myself a few times and been in games where other players did so, and it didn't have any horrible effects on the tournament. Maybe an option for this to happen might be nice but it doesn't need to be automatic. There's a difference between someone who takes 2 turns and times out, vs. a person who took their final turn with -30 minutes (on a multi-day timer). Especially when tournament players are in different countries it can cause problems; if your turn begins at 1:00 AM your time you may have lost 7-9 hours of your timer before you can even take your turn.

[hma_19]

Thanks BGA for a big step to resolve this issue. We will see how it works.

Does it apply to tournaments that have already been created?

[Silene]

Wow, this was a quick fix. Awesome! And I think it's a good balance. Well done

Only thing I would add would be expulsion of players that haven't finished 1 (or maybe 2) games in the same tournament (by their fault).

[JoysJoy]

Thank you. I appreciate your thoughtful rules.

[ufm]

Unrelated question: are players absent at the beginning of a real-time tournament removed?